Familypedia talk:First Steps/Image quality and description
Formats- Maybe Wikia has a general formats document like that referenced on Commons? *WMV/ MP3 (Windows Video Media) / MPEGaudio layer 3) Is this incorrect? Philosophically I like OGG (Ogg Vorbis), but personally I don't have hardly anything in OGG. It's all MP3. *SVG- (Scalable Vector Graphics) Someone mentioned this is not allowed on wikia, yet I see some uploads. Can't imagine why they aren't allowed/ or are discouraged, but if so- that is a difference that needs to be addressed. *TIFF- (Tagged Image File Format) I imagine the restriction is true here too. Same thing about server loading on scaling the dang things. :::-Phlox- 21:52, 10 September 2007 (UTC) I'm not sure what you are dealing with here. The article title "Image quality and description) implies that you are concerned with the best choice for image storage. Yet of the varous file extensions shown, only one (TIFF) deals with still images per se. The other extensions are either for sound, or for video graphics. While I'd like to see those kinds of things supported on Wikia (lots of interesting possibilities for that) I don't think they are currently supported. If you use the upload file link the resultant upload seems to be designed for a still image. As an overall observation, one of the tacit restrictions on file extensions is related to file size. They don't want you to go above 150KB. Most graphics will comress nicely to 150KB, but it works better if you use an appropriate file type. TIFF's and PNG's give good detail, but very large files. GIF's work better for simple line graphics, and JPEGS or similar for photographs. But of course, there are always going to be images where 150KB will not do the job. They don't seem to be too hardover on the limit, but I suspect a 1.0 MB would try someone's patience. And might draw unwanted attention to some of those larger than 150 KB files that we have. Bill 01:01, 11 September 2007 (UTC) :Misnomer in the title of the article. The Commons document titles the document simply "Quality and description". Clearly this talks only about Media. I went too narrow, forgetting that it did comment on other media besides images. :As for what this portion article is about, consideration of storage formats is about 1% of the content. The main goal is to get folks to well annotated images that are legible enough for folks to use. :The article discusses many types of image formats. I confined my comments above to information that might be wrong. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 06:00, 11 September 2007 (UTC) SVG I've just searched http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Imagelist for "svg": not one hit. Robin Patterson 05:43, 11 September 2007 (UTC) :No, they are on wikia sites. EG: howto:Image:Commons-logo.svg. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 06:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC) Like yourself, this is one I wasn't familiar with, and also had difficulty finding information about it on the web---and when I did, the information provided didn't really help understand what it was about. A search for "Scalable Vector Graphics" seems to do better. And no, its not strictly on Wikia. I checked the possibilities for file types on GraphicConverter (Mac only program---PC users should be so lucky, but its not been ported to a PC). GraphicConverter allows you to save a file in a great many formats--perhaps 80+ choices. One of the choices is SVG. The options it gives for saving the file as .SVG include embedding an image as GIF, JPEG, and PNG. Not sure exactly what that means, but I suspect that selecting .SVG gives you a file in an SVG programming language, that incorporates an image file. Not sure what the advantage is. Before I followed this guidance I'd want to know why I would want to save something as SVG. While I can apparently do that, I'm not sure how useful this is for the majority of users---as I don't have PC oriented graphics packages to check. Bill 13:00, 11 September 2007 (UTC) ::I didn't review this section, and imagine that I will tone down whatever it says when I do the revision. There are SVG zealots at Commons, and they have some valid points for what commons is used for. These arguments are largely irrelevant to our site. They are hard to create- but you have it right. There is an article on WP if interested, but they are structured graphics, so the advantage is that they scale perfectly- no jaggies if big, no blotchyness if way small. If you are reusing images for unknown applications, this is great stuff because you can have a map of say Norway and if you want it 60PX then it will reduce detail to the correct essentials, but you can also also blow it up to see details of fjords. ::But if you are using the map always at the same size on the site, who wants to bother with all that stuff. For icons it is great- but we can just upload all the ones we need from Commons and don't have to create our own. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 19:06, 11 September 2007 (UTC) Submitting Information I would like to know how I can sumbit my information. I have some that can be added onto a family. Should I just type it in or is there a specific way??Kerrywhite 05:26, 6 April 2008 (UTC)